Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Ebola virus is no match for feminine power

These
days everyone is talking about Ebola.
I remember reading news article in early
2014 discussing
spread of Ebola in West African countries. It was very puzzling since
such highly virulent infectious agents are usually self-limiting.
Something is certainly different this time. It appears it now developed
a mutation allowing prolonged incubation time.

It
is obvious Ebola is new virus for human immune system and most
likely there is no natural (genetic) immunity against it.
It means that adaptive immune system goes into overdrive because
innate system lacks genetic memory of Ebola and is unable to properly
instruct effector T and B cells. In this situation, survival
depends on presence antibody or T cells cross-reactive to
environmental microbes or host commensals.

However,
sometimes protection against virulent infections can come from
unexpected corner. Here is such example for Ebola. While
researching Ebola publications prior to 2014 outbreak,
I came across two research articles about Ebola that immediately
caught my attention.

Basic
idea of the studies were to screen
FDA-approved drugs to see if any of the drugs would
protect against category A biological threat agents, like Ebola. This
is called drug re-purposing and has many advantages considering the
fact that lengthy human safety studies have already been conducted on
such medications.